The Habermas Machine

The death of the German public intellectual Jurgen Habermas at the age of 96 provides a useful starting point to consider the current developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI). I referred to him as a public intellectual, rather than a philosopher or a sociologist, because his political role - and I do literally mean his performance of a role - is the bulk of his legacy. In the future, few outside of academia will read his works, such as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere or The Theory of Communicative Action, but his ideas about democratic discourse, suitably vulgarised, will survive in the memory of his liberal admirers. This memory was summarised by the Guardian's editorial that marked his death in two statements: first, "that our nature as linguistic beings puts reason and the search for consensus at the core of who we are"; and second, that Habermas's "concept of the public sphere, where rational debate can take place and disagreements be brokered, implied pluralism, civility and inclusion." 

The first statement is little more than obeisance to the just-so story of the Enlightenment, which ignores the realities of power and the irreconcilable interests of class in favour of an essentialist abstraction: Rodney King's "Can't we all just get along?" In particular, it sidelines the key criticism of instrumental reason advanced by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which was the intellectual context of Habermas's emergence in the postwar era as a junior member of the Frankfurt School before he struck out on his own. The second statement ignores the structural constraints on the public sphere that make a mockery of such terms as pluralism, civility and inclusion. An object example would be the closing down of debate on Gaza in Germany, which Habermas himself contributed to by co-signing a statement by established academics in November 2023 that Israel's response to the October 7th attack was "justified".

Being on the wrong side of history is an occupational hazard for any public intellectual, but in Habermas's case losing the public argument became a distinguishing feature. As Peter Verovšek put it: "While it is certainly true that Habermas was accorded a certain respect as the éminence grise of the German public sphere, this recognition is more visible in the vehemence with which he was attacked than in the agreement his interventions found. ... Habermas never lost his commitment to democracy — to the idea that he could only present arguments, leaving his fellow citizens the communicative agency to decide what they thought and what they wanted to do, even if their decisions would often go against him". What this highlights for me is the extent to which Habermas was engaged (perhaps unwittingly) in a performance, like the court jester whose lèse-majesté is indulged but ultimately ignored.

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas argued that there was a fundamental shift in the 18th century from a "representational" culture centred on the court, where power was imposed through ritual and splendour, to a "public" culture centred on dialogue, criticism and consensus in multiple, more modest and disparate arenas, from coffee houses to Masonic lodges, which arose as a result of capitalism. There are two points to make about this. First, that the historical reality was less clear cut, the simple disjuncture of Habermas's tale ignoring the epistemological traditions of scholasticism and the Rennaisance as well as the persistence (and even recrudescence under Fascism) of overpowering ritual and splendour. And second, that the public sphere birthed by capitalism was just as much of a performance of power, a point noted not only by Adorno and Horkheimer but by later theorists such as Michel Foucault. The quadrille may have replaced the minuet, but they were both dances.

So what has all this got to do with AI? One claim is that AI may help achieve consensus in the realm of politics by mediating discourse: a theory tested by Google DeepMind's so-called Habermas Machine. Large language models (LLMs) are built on discourse in the form of written statements. These may be assertions (discourse is not limited to dialogue), or they may be commentary on other statements: disputations, counter-arguments, critique. These statements may or may not have a truth value. Though the appetite for more training data has meant that more and more of what is fed into the machine is low-grade, and increasingly the recycled slop of AI itself, the original intent was to privilege academic and technical literature on the grounds that this would be more reliably truthful. This meant absorbing the academic (even scholastic) paradigms inherent in the data: exegesis, citation, disputation. This preference isn't novel in digital technology. Google's Page Rank is a paradigmatic application of peer review, after all. 

The result is that AI's determination to be authoritative leads it to "generate detailed “reports”, including names and dates, references and sources – the kind of material that suggests deep research and understanding, but may in fact be hallucinated or nonexistent." AI aims to be plausible by mimicing the forms and tropes of academic and scientific publication. Given all that we know about the institutional biases of academia, the prevalence of hoaxes and the crisis of replicability, is it any wonder that AI generates bullshit? AI's determination isn't a product of the data but of the programming. It has become fashionable to talk of LLMs as inscrutable, which leads to the anthropomorphism of "consciousness", but the reality is that they are curated and operate within quite strict boundaries. AI is problematic because of the biases inherent in the training data but also because of the trainers' own biases encoded into the guardrails - e.g. the pre-emptive interventions intended to stop it going full Mecha-Hitler - and the micro-decisions of thousands of human data "cleaners". 

The American blogger Noah Smith recently claimed that "AI is a force for moderation. If I'm a Republican, and I talk to AI, I'm talking to something that was trained on data from both Republicans and Democrats. So the AI is more likely to pull me towards the center." The assumption that LLMs are big enough to avoid bias, like the idea of an equidistant "center", ignores the role of selection (both in the sense of what gets published and what is absorbed into the model) and misunderstands that there are real differences in political language. While to outside observers the Democrats and Republicans look like two wings of the same party, as Gore Vidal once memorably noted, they employ distinct vocabularies and rhetorical forms. The Democrats also want to bomb Iran and provide more money and arms to Israel, they just deplore the vulgarity of Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth. 

In simple terms, conservatives tend to be more assertive while centrists place a higher value on civility. Each can be considered a strategy of domination, arguably echoing Habermas's distinction between the representational (imposed) and the public (consensual). In other words, Republican and Democrat data (written statements that reflect their ideological positions) are not necessarily the same, not just in their differences of vocabulary ("liberty" and "wealth" versus "society" and "investment" etc) but in the force and style of their arguments (confidently normative versus cautiously empirical, for example). Consequently, there is no good reason to believe that AI will avoid bias in its interpretation. It depends on what it has come to value through training and what parameters it has been given by its all-too-human programmers. 

We also have to bear in mind that AI is backward-looking, just as the academic and scientific milieux it relies on are. It privileges established knowledge (which may be wrong), which means it is inevitably conservative: there can be no paradigm shift, let alone a singularity. It lacks the imagination that distinguishes genuine human intelligence. In Habermas's lifeworld, knowledge is advanced by research and the gathering of more data, ultimately through the continuing growth of the global population - i.e. by the reproduction of human intelligence and the renewed experience of the world. The problem for AI, which has been brewing for some years and cannot be offset by "more compute", is that the quality of fresh data has plummeted because we've already used all the good stuff. Its attempts to originate knowledge, to create novel data by inference, too often result in hallucinations that strive for the credibility of form, not of substance. 

Habermas fulfilled a necessary role for postwar Germany, advocating and personally exemplifying a theory of participatory democracy while the Ordoliberal establishment secured market liberalism from democratic challenge. At the crucial juncture of 1968, he turned against the socialist student movement. Thereafter, for all his denunciations of the right in the Historikerstreit (historians' dispute) and his later criticisms of the EU's shortcomings, he functioned as the tame conscience of German liberalism. Just as Habermas lapsed into irrelevance, so AI will become ever more conservative as it strives for authoritativeness (borrowing the name of an eminent German thinker without his permission being an example of this) and as the economic incentives encourage a dumbing-down for safety's sake (being sued for consequential damages is a bigger worry than being sued for copyright breaches). Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will remain as much of a Utopian ideal, just out of reach, as a public sphere where pluralism, civility and inclusion reign. 

Doing Violence to Language

In their trite language, shallow reasoning and obsession with status the "News Agents" podcast team of Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel and Lewis Goodall quickly established themselves as the voice of liberal Middle England: patronising, entitled and fundamentally anti-intellectual. But the Bondi Beach murders and the immediate unanimity of the press in claiming that this is what "globalise the intifada" means has now prompted them to grapple with the linguistic turn in philosophy, albeit half a century late. Obviously they weren't about to start quoting Foucault, let alone Wittegenstein, but they were happy to dabble in speech-act theory as Maitlis asked "If language becomes entrenched, does it become the beginning of violence? Is language itself violent?" Sopel's response was to note that two propositions can be simultaneously true: that words in support of Palestinians can be legitimate and also intimidating to Jews, which makes it a "knotty problem" for the police. As an aside, the police appear to have cut the knot by agreeing to arrest people if there is enough media clamour over certain phrases and then let the courts sort it out.

This was a fatuous exchange that simply highlighted once more the pernicious role of asymmetric balance in broadcast media. Thus the right of pro-Palestinian protestors to articulate a political demand is balanced by the right of certain British Jews to not feel uncomfortable. The historian Simon Schama chipped in on Twitter to cite John Stuart Mill's harm principle, which can be summarised as: "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." This is more popularly interpreted by the phrase (often misattributed to Mill) "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins". But the problem with this is that the point at which another's action becomes a harm to you may not be as obvious as the end of your nose. UK law is quite clear that words can only be considered illegal if they constitute hate speech, incitement or defamation. The problem arises in determining what words amount to hate, incitement or defamation.

In the 1970s, the linguistic turn led to a recognition that vocabularies and grammar reflect structures of power. At the practical level, the result was a lot more attention being paid to the effect of language. There were positive aspects to this, such as the growing social unacceptability of racist, homophobic and misogynistic remarks, but also negative aspects, such as moralising and tone-policing. As these developments were seen as progressive, the inevitable reactionary response was an initial focus on "free speech absolutism", which largely boiled down to the right of powerful white men to verbally abuse minorities. But this has now given way on the political right to an explicit embrace of censorship, often by the same people who still insist on their right to free speech. This apparent paradox is easily resolved when you realise that it is founded on a hierarchy of regard: certain people's feelings matter and should be protected by the state, while other people's feelings don't matter so you are free to insult them. It is an example of Wilhoit's Law in action.

The right has always recuperated progressive ideas and rhetoric for reactionary ends. Thus the concept of liberty, which began as a demand for the freedom of religious conscience, eventually came to mean little more than the rights of property-holders. The "language is violence" trope is just the latest example of this process. A phrase once associated with feminists critiquing consumer culture is now deployed to justify banning protests. Perhaps the most startling example of recuperation in recent years has been the transformation of "radical" feminism from an emancipatory and generous project into a reactionary and paranoid one whose apparent goal is to excise the very possibility of gender non-conformance. This obviously doesn't describe all feminists or all feminist practice, but you'd struggle to appreciate that if you relied on the media, which simply emphasises the point that language en masse - the volume of words used to describe the world through the channels of public discourse - inevitably reflects the power structures of the day.

The current debate about what can and cannot be said is the inevitable consequence of the government's foolish decision to go beyond proscribing Palestine Action to banning expressions of support for the organisation. This has opened the door for demands to ban various phrases purely on the grounds of subjective interpretation. Thus "from the river to the sea" is interpreted as a call to wipe Israel off the map, rather than a demand for equal rights, while "globalise the intifada" is interpreted as a call for the genocide of all Jews, rather than solidarity with the Palestinian people's struggle. That these interpretations are contested should be evidence enough that they cannot reasonably be banned, but the political speech-act that is the call for their banning is not intended to outlaw specific phrases but to cultivate a climate in which support for the Palestinian cause is always illegitimate. This demand will not be satisfied until the very word "Palestine" is outlawed as harmful to the sensitivities of British Jews. 

What we are witnessing can legitimately be described using that much-abused term Orwellian, whereby a political issue becomes ever more difficult to address as the language is circumscribed. But the world of 1984 is not one in which public discourse is uniformly limited so much as it is stratified by class. The tightly-controlled Newspeak is the argot of the managerial class and the intelligentisa. Prolespeak, the organic language of the mass of workers, is beyond the party's control, hence why Winston Smith believes that it is only among the proles that hope lies, and hence why the party relies on pornography and sentimentality to keep the workers quiet. In Britain today, the common culture is ever more reliant on a media diet of pornography (property porn, food porn etc) and sentimentality, while the intelligentsia is marginalised as irrelevant, and the managerial class employs a vocabulary that emphasises the individual over the collective through the jargon of entrepreneurialism and psychotherapy ("solidarity" is as infra dig as socialism).

In this environment, political discourse is infantilised. Commentators are obsessed with the pettiness of "who's in, who's out" and the playground taunting of the House of Commons. Inquiry is limited to asking politicians to comment on the words of other politicians, rather than to explain policy. And worst of all, the public are assumed to have an intellectual capacity that doesn't extend beyond moronic metaphors about maxed-out credit cards. But if the public is taken to be stupid, it is also taken to be dangerous. An ill-mannered mob that is prey to demagogues (our commentators have all read their Plato), but also an organic mass that is capable of directed action against their betters when activated by agitators. The common thread is the belief that language is both a potential danger (inflammatory) and a potential salve (placatory). 

Orwell was wrong to imagine that sculpting the language of the bureaucracy and the intelligentsia was the basis of totalitarianism, not least because both of those fractions of society are only too keen to self-police for reasons of career advancement and social status. The authority of the state has always depended on preventing ideas in free circulation among the upper strata from reaching the lower. The tragedy of the French Revolution for conservatives, and subsequently for many liberals like Simon Schama, was that ideas of liberty and enlightenment were perverted when deployed among the lower orders, leading to an orgy of violence. Likewise, Emily Maitlis is not suggesting that language is a tool of structural violence, an insight that might lead her to question her own role, but that in the wrong hands it can be destabilising. What the British politico-media caste is arguing for is straighforward censorship.

The Human Condition

The UK's welfare system is not "broken", as some Labour MPs have claimed. If it were, then you would expect it to be failing across the board in its core purpose, which is to stop people dying from hunger and neglect. At the margin there is certainly unneccesary suffering, often the result of prior attempts at the "reform" of conditionality and procedure, but that is a different matter, specifically a matter of efficiency. In terms of effectiveness, the system is robust and does what it is meant to do. The pragmatic discussion on welfare centres on the level of benefits, and sure enough the government's mooted plans for welfare reform have, beyond the rhetoric about "moral duty", boiled down to the question of real-term cuts. But the wider framing is of existential crisis, and that cannot be explained away as either the result of systemic failure or the product of waste, which is both a chronic issue (there will always be some fraud and error at the margin) and relatively small. There is plenty to criticise in the design and operation of the welfare system, but nobody can seriously claim that it fails to do the job given it by Parliament. So why do politicians, and Labour's backbench Get Britain Working Group in particular, think that the system is broken? The argument, outlined in a letter to Liz Kendall, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, stands on three claims. 

The first is the idea that "Britain faces a crisis of economic inactivity". Despite the passing reference to NEETs, the letter focuses on the fact that employment levels among disabled people are 30% lower than among the non-disabled. You might pause at this point and wonder if that is actually a problem. Surely levels are always going to be lower: many disabled people simply cannot work. Even if you accept that the gap might be reduced by 10%, you will then wonder just how many extra workers this would produce. A little under a quarter of the working-age population have a disability of some sort, and most of them already work. A 10% change in employment levels would thus equate to roughly a 2.5% increase in the working population. That's not to be sniffed at, though as we're talking about marginal labour it is likely that the consequent output gain would not be proportionate. In other words, a 10% improvement in employment levels among the disabled might increase GDP by only 1% or less. But given that growth is the chief goal of this government, that would still be a welcome contribution.

The second claim of the GBWG is that "The economic cost of this is staggering". Leaving aside the hyperbole, this is also questionable. Not only would any increase in GDP be marginal, but there are good reasons to suspect that the types of jobs that would be created will be at the bottom end of the pay-scale and that a rapid increase in available labour would, as a simple matter of supply and demand, have a dampening effect on pay growth. In other words, getting more disabled people into work is not, whatever its other benefits, going to raise aggregate skill levels or productivity and thus long-term pay rates. The final claim is that "the current system often acts as a barrier against finding work." Expanding on this, the GBWG insist that "Rather than empowering individuals, it traps them in precarity". This is an odd claim because insofar as the welfare system makes claimants lives precarious it is through conditionality and sanctions, including the threat of benefits clawback should they secure temporary work. In other words, the system is not preventing them finding casual employment, but it can penalise them when they do. The broader problem that paid work may lead to a negligible increase in income is an issue of low pay, not high benefits.

The letter talks of the security and dignity of employment but ignores that these ideals have been steadily eroded under neoliberalism to the point where they have been replaced by their opposites, rebadged as the ideal of "flexibility" and the "hack" of eating a cheese sandwich at your desk as you work through your lunch-hour. Precarity has become pervasive among lower income workers because of zero-hour contracts and the need to take multiple jobs to make ends meet, not because more disabled people are on benefits. It also ignores that chivvying the disabled into low-paid work is unlikely to increase their sense of security and doesn't look very dignified from any angle. If the letter was a transparent attempt to encourage backbench support for the government's plans to tighten the rules on eligibility for disabled benefits, in particular for the young with mental health issues (the solipsistic "snowflake" has leapfrogged the shameless skiver on the media's list of public enemies), the rumoured real terms cut in PIP looks like a dead cat that will now be consigned to the bin as a quid pro quo for allowing that tightening to proceed. 

Starmer's "private address" to MPs, which has been helpfully released to the press, echoed the letter in imagining a frustrated population of disabled people held back from fulfilling employment by a perverse welfare system: "Addressing a meeting of the parliamentary Labour party in Westminster, Starmer said the current system was “discouraging people from working ... And if you want to work, the government should support you, not stop you”." Continuing in this vein, "Starmer said the government would promise to “make work pay” for those who could work", which studiously ignores that we have had working tax credits for a quarter of a century because for too many people work simply does not pay. If his address had included a commitment to significantly raise the national minimum wage (arguably a smarter "tax" on employers than increasing NICs) then it would have been more coherent.

The idea that the state somehow discourages work is obviously absurd, but it's of a part with Starmer's more general claim that government is the problem. This doesn't mean he has taken a libertarian turn (the chat about "Project Chainsaw" is little more than a cruel joke by Morgan McSweeney), rather he is insisting that government must be more determined and effective at driving neoliberal restructuring, hence the related decision to further centralise power by abolishing NHS England. Undoing the Lansley reforms makes sense, but we shouldn't imagine that this dirigiste turn heralds the dismantling of the internal market, less reliance on outsourcing to the private healthcare sector, or a major programme of investment to address the physical decay of the last 15 years. Starmer's attempt to present himself as the Great Emancipator of the Civil Service, unshackling the talent, is simultaneously undermined by his naive belief that AI can do much of the work. What this confusion highlights is that he remains a process guy, not a people guy, something that should give the swooning fans of his shuttle diplomacy pause for thought.

There is a general confusion in the Labour Party these days over its purpose and this is reflected in the understanding of work. Some see Labour as the party of work, in the sense of a managerial class seeking to optimise labour as a factor of production (the Fabian legacy congruent with neoliberalism). Others see Labour (still) as the party of workers (or at least "working people") and thus a class formation. This isn't a simple right-versus-left dichotomy as many on the party right, particularly those formed in the trade union movement, still see Labour as the workers' party. Likewise, some on the left, influenced by the tradition of social liberalism, have seen work in terms of self-actualisation rather than collective progress. It's perhaps worth pausing at this point and considering a distinction made by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition between "animal laborans" (engaged in the brute struggle to secure shelter and food) and "homo faber" (making the world in the form of useful goods). She also included a third category, political activity or "action". In its classical origins, this was limited to the elite, but by 1958, when the book was published in an era of material plenty and high employment, there was a recognition that civic society was expanding through greater democratisation to include groups hitherto marginalised, such as the working class, women and ethnic minorities.

Arendt's progressive hierarchy was typical of postwar thinking, though it should be noted she was warning of its problems: the trivialisation of life as necessity recedes and the subsititution of action by consumption. In the optimistic telling, technology and superior management would gradually do away with the necessity of animal laborans (like AI will do away with civil servants) but it would also allow homo faber to progress to a more active civic life. What has happened since is a collapse of the boundaries between the three conditions. The hard division between venal business and the elite practice of politics, first established in the Greek city states of the Classical era, has evaporated as politics has adopted the theory and manner of business. But just as significantly the neoliberal era has seen the boundary between necessity and productivity erode. In the early industrial era, as analysed by Marx and others, necessity was reduced to the mimimum needed to keep workers alive while maximising production. The reaction to that inhumanity (the Polanyian counter-movement) led to the creation of a clear boundary between necessity and productivity: the Factory Acts, the 8-hour day, public services beyond the mere reproduction of labour. Necessity became a social concern.

What we have seen since the 1970s is an attempt to make necessity once more the responsibility of the individual, most obviously (in the UK at least) in the context of shelter. The rhetorical division of society into strivers and shirkers is not about the creation of a new class consciousness among the former but instead the atomisation of society into individuals whose own efforts constantly determine their categorisation. Labour's plans for the disabled are consistent with this, an initiative that will ignore individual circumstance (critics loudly citing specific cases of potential injustice are wasting their breath) while simultaneously denying the individual identification with anything other than the nebulous "working people" beloved of Starmer's speechwriters. Though the positive language of "security, dignity and agency" remains, it is clear that work is seen less as a route to self-actualisation than as an obligatory contribution to the economy. We have a moral duty not to treat people instrumentally, but that clearly isn't a guiding principle at the DWP, while the very name of the Get Britain Working Group of MPs subsumes the interests of both the individual and the working class in the greater glory of national GDP.

In Arendt's day it was still possible to imagine the civic sphere in the idealistic terms that would have been familiar to Pericles, despite the jarring reality (McCarthyism, venality, jobbery). No longer. Politics today is performed by managerialist drones like Wes Streeting and Liz Kendall, who celebrate their lack of idealism as maturity, while the real power in the land, the nexus of private wealth and corporate influence, avoids the public square. The postwar dream of welfare as the auxiliary support for homo faber, banishing necessity and encouraging civic participation, has given way to a revival of the Victorian principle of "less eligibility", but this time without the commitment to at least provide animal laborans with the shelter of the poor house.

Public Goods, the Social Wage and Universalism

My X thread about Deborah Meaden's comments on the winter fuel allowance has done numbers, as the kids say, but I suspect that those who criticised it, and perhaps some who appreciated it, didn't get the joke at the beginning or ultimately the point at the end, though the latter may be down to not reading the entire thread. Excuse me if I ignore the cardinal rule of both comedy and the British royal family and try to explain. 

Meaden trots out the classic argument of the rich against universal benefits: I don't need it so the taxpayer's money is being wasted. This is often accompanied by an assurance that the unnecessary government largesse is routinely donated to charity, so virtue triumphs in the end. You'll note that this argument and its corollary are less often heard when tax cuts for the wealthy are being justified, though the rationale is the same. If you're already incurring the top rate of tax on a large part of your income, why do you need more money? In that instance the argument in favour of tax cuts focuses on incentives: that the prospect of keeping more of your earnings will make you more productive, which can only help the wider economy. This is a consequentialist argument: what matters is the outcome, which is presumed to be good. There are similar consequentialist arguments against universalism, which can be summarised using Albert O. Hirschman's The Rhetoric of Reaction: giving money to people who don't need it discredits the benefits regime and so lowers public support for the needy (perversity); in benefiting everyone, no one gains in relative terms (futility); and an income guarantee weakens the effect of any incentive to expand income and so undermines the wider economy (jeopardy).

Meaden's argument is different in that it isn't simply consequentialist but utilitarian (a narrower form of consequentialism), which means it concerns itself with calculable efficiency, the greatest possible good,  rather than just an assessment of good versus bad. Specifically, it seeks to maximise aggregate utility through discrimination: "Lots of people should not get winter fuel allowance…lots should", as she put it in her tweet. The former group have a negligible marginal utility because they are rich, the latter have a high marginal utility because they are poor, and there is an implied gradient between the two where everyone can be positioned. One paradox of utilitarianism (among many) is that achieving this macro optimality requires a granular focus on the micro foundations - the utility calculus of the individual - hence Meaden's focus on her own circumstances. Solipsism is a hallmark of vulgar utilitarian reasoning: "I don't need X" or "I never had Y growing up". Jeremy Bentham's "felicific calculus" may have inspired the concept of utility in the emergent field of economics, but its ambitions to be a coordinating mechanism for society soon gave way among theorists (from Jevons to Hayek) to price as the only reliable signal of utility in aggregate. But while absent in the market, utilitarian calculus lived on in the realm of discretionary welfare, notably in the form of personal need assessments and means-testing.

Public goods, in the sense employed in economics, bypass the problem of individual assessment by operating wholly at the macro level. We assume, quite reasonably, that there is an aggregate benefit for society delivered by the provision of certain goods and services, such as roads. Economic theory holds that these goods are characterised by two features: they are non-excludable (i.e. freely available to all), and they are non-rivalrous (i.e. my use does not compromise your use). In reality, most public goods are imperfect in terms of this abstract defintion (or "impure", in the jargon). Nationalised utilities in the postwar era charged for use of gas and electricity, which meant you could be excluded (i.e. cut off). Today we still have toll roads, albeit with electronic turnpikes, such as part of the M6, the Dartford Crossing and the Humber Bridge. These are still classed as public goods, because the charges are treated as an impost (a supplementary tax based on use), but you will be excluded if you can't pay the toll. Likewise, roads are rivalrous because, as Adam Driver said in the 2023 film Enzo Ferrari, "two objects cannot occupy the same point in space at the same moment in time." In other words, congestion makes vehicles rivalrous (think of parking spaces).

In the UK, the logic of public provision was extended in the postwar era to many areas of the economy and public life previously subject to the market, giving rise to the concept of the social wage: the benefit that we individually gain from collective effort, whether in the form of public goods (roads, libraries), welfare services (the NHS, state schools) or direct financial payments (state pensions, unemployment benefit). In reaction, conservatives challenged both the extent of the social wage and the categorisation of its components, particularly in areas where the public sector was seen to be pushing back the private sector, such as health and education. Central to this reaction was the insistence that genuine public goods are few and far between and that what is left over within the scope of the social wage should be treated as a discretionary benefit and therefore means-tested (returning to the approach of the inter-war years). At the margin, among market fundamentalists, this reaction has led to continuing attempts to narrow the scope of public goods even further by either converting them to state-supplied commodities (e.g. road-pricing) or by privatising them altogether (e.g. railways and water companies). 

It came as no surprise that some of those disputing the intentionally ridiculous comparison of public goods (roads) with a benefit (the Winter Fuel Allowance) should also be advocates of road-pricing. For them, "confusing" the two was a purity violation (to borrow a term from moral foundations theory), but not because they are champions of public goods but because they want to advance the narrowest possible interpretation of them. Their apparent inability to see a joke (clearly the WFA is not actually a public good) is similar to the media suspicion that advocates for public goods want to impose broadband communism or nationalise sausages - i.e. not entirely sincere. This po-faced response also points to a narrow conception of public policy discourse in which the mathematical calculus of liberal economics is all that matters: utility is not a laughing matter. This narrow perspective also means that such critics cannot see that Meaden's comments are not the self-evident common sense that they imagine but actually a highly political statement and one founded (consciously or not) in the ideological presumption that social policy should be determined by aggregate utility, i.e. utilitarianism.

The intersection of reactionary conservativism (minimse public goods) and liberal utilitarianism (maximise efficiency) has resulted in the steady erosion of the principle of universalism. A feature of this has been the tendency of liberals to adopt the conservatives' framing, talking about universal benefits as if they are public goods that had been erroneously categorised. This explains why the discussion of the viability of such benefits tends to centre on excludability (as a positive) and rivalry (as a negative). For example, "It is absurd to give the wealthy cash that they do not need" leads to the insistence that they be excluded so that the needy can have more (or, more likely, that the benefits "bill" can be reduced). The idea that the cash can simply be clawed-back through taxation is rarely entertained and then only to complain about its "redundancy", despite the obvious operational superiority of using an existing mechanism over creating a new means-testing regime. In contrast, rivalry tends to occur within the arena of universal benefits through engineered scarcity: the competition to get through on the phone to book a doctor's appointment, or going private to beat the waiting list. This framing of benefits as if they were public goods is adopted partly to avoid a frontal attack on universalism, which obviously remains popular (e.g. the NHS), but it also reflects the extent to which half a century of neoliberalism has shifted the discourse of social policy away from the collective to the individual through the vocabulary of representative agents, marginal utility and incentives.

The joke that opened the thread was an ironic response to Meaden describing the Winter Fuel Allowance as a "universal scheme". The WFA isn't universal - I don't get it and you probably don't either. You might counter that this is because it is for pensioners only, but then why describe it as universal? Well, you might retort, child benefit is universal but the childless don't get it, do they? Indeed, but they have no need of it. I, on the other hand, have fuel bills to pay but do not qualify for the WFA. The truth is that it was introduced by Gordon Brown (no fan of universalism) in 1997 as a targeted electoral bribe, to be paid to a Tory-inclined cohort and therefore a priority to be won over by a Labour government. But while she described the WFA as universal, Meaden's argument against it employed the language of the miscategorised public good: to paraphrase, "rich people like me should be excluded from it". I parodied this by pointing out the insanity of extending this logic to an actual public good, roads. In doing so I was also highlighting the absurdity of centring the public policy debate on the personal circumstances of individuals who are definitionally atypical of society: the rich.

The wider point is that not only are there very few "pure" public goods, which are both non-excludable and non-rivalrous, but there are nowadays very few genuine universal benefits either. Most of what we imagine to be universal, like the state pension, depends on National Insurance contributions. The truly universal - available to everyone regardless - are the minimal benefits when all other contributory benefits have run out, and the state has long aimed to restrict these to a minority who, by virtue of their dependence on them, are seen as recalcitrant and therefore worthy targets for public contempt. It's also worth noting the long-running campaign of the media to make even these minimal benefits discretionary: not to be paid to the feckless, to single mothers popping out babies and certainly not to asylum-seekers. The two-child cap, which was heavily promoted by rightwing newspapers, is literally a pointed refusal to accept that benefits should be universal. That it is targeted at the demonstrably innocent isn't simply an example of cruelty, it is a clear statement that need is irrelevant. Deborah Meaden's insistence that she doesn't "need" the WFA and her advocacy for means-testing are actually old hat. The bleeding-edge of social policy thought is the denial that society has any obligation to the needy.

To the Greater Glory

In an LBC interview in which Rachel Johnson sought, under the cover of reflections on Easter and the decline of Christian worship, to push a polite, middle class version of the Great Replacement Theory (here in the form of mosques springing up across Europe as churches stood empty), Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and "famous atheist" (as Fox News put it, channelling their inner Viz), described himself as a "cultural Christian", which seemed to come down to regretting Sadiq Khan celebrating Ramadan. This immediately overshadowed Johnson's agenda and even led to the Daily Telegraph's parliamentary sketchwriter, Madeline Grant, hailing a "spiritual volte face" unprecedented since Paul on the road to Damascus, illustrating once more that this class of frivolous journalism is characterised by its inability to pay attention as much as by its lack of descriptive originality. Grant appreciates that Dawkins remains an atheist, but she none the less uses the term "conversion" to describe his act of witness, so what exactly is the professor emeritus converting to?

The obvious point to make is that Dawkins hasn't really changed his tune over the years. There has been no conversion, no sudden flash of revelation. He has been a cultural Christian - relishing the form but deriding the content - in plain sight all along. His rebarbative style was always an expression of the academic top table milieu that formed him rather than some innate radicalism. He would happily call you a superstitious idiot, but he would not support Denis Diderot's contention that "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest". Too uncultured; too much redolent of the mob. Grant's article gives us a clue as to what is really going on here when it segues via some waffle about the decline of Christianity in Scotland to a full-throated attack on the SNP's "draconian hate crime legislation", which then links to the usual defence of St Joan of Rowling. Dawkins himself has been a loud defender of the novelist (and also Kathleen Stock) against what he descibes as trans activist "bullies". 

His fundamentalist defence of biological sex is driven by the same British empiricism that motivates his atheism. That philosophical approach, dating back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, has obvious overlaps with the evolution of political and economic Liberalism, but it also stimulated Romanticism in the cultural sphere, both as an anti-Enlightenment reaction and as a compromise between conservative and progressive impulses. What Dawkins refers to as cultural Christianity is an expression of that: a man of science among the picturesque abbey ruins contemplating the sublime. But cultural Christianity has deeper roots, going back to the English Reformation. Dawkins is very much an Englishman in this respect, the parallel Scottish Reformation with its Calvinist intolerance and strict social observances being as uncongenial to him as contemporary Islam (Scotland enters his mental space only with the Scottish Enlightenment of David Hume and Adam Smith). And we shouldn't forget that the attack upon the Roman church, and the fact that it was a top-down movement - a raison d'etat, is as much a part of the evolution of English atheism as the Enlightenment was.

Anglicanism is ridiculous as theology, the monarch as head of the church being only the most obvious of its absurdities. But as an expression of a culture dedicated to property rights, born out of the expropriation of the monasteries under Henry VIII and the resulting emergence of the political gentry and the improving tenantry, it was immensely powerful and retains a cultural clout today precisely because of its legacy property portfolio. When Dawkins lists the charms of Christianity he quickly moves on from hymns and carols to emphasise the danger of losing "our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches". He's not talking about Catholic churches or Methodist chapels here, and nor is he making a point about architectural merit. Likewise, Rachel Johnson's worry that those churches are emptying while new mosques spring up is not simply Islamophobia but a belief that "our" culture is defined by its property and more precisely by who has the right to own it. She admits her own Christianity "waxes and wanes" as if this wasn't the most Anglican statement imaginable.

Both Dawkins and Johnson are products of the English gentry so this mindset is natural to them. They cannot imagine a country in which the right sort - i.e. people like them - aren't in control. When Dawkins describes Christianity as "a fundamentally decent religion", in contrast to Islam, he isn't making a theological point but describing his comfort with an "ethos" that is congenial to him and his class, and congenial precisely because it is the historic expression of that class's social and political interests. When he expresses concern that the King as Prince of Wales was sympathetic to Islam, he doesn't stop to consider that many of the monarch's subjects are Muslims: these people are other. Likewise, his distinction between Anglicanism and fundamentalist Christianity in America centres less on any doctrinal differences, or even attitudes to such matters as evolution, female ordination or abortion, than on the expressions of class: the idea that American Christianity is fundamentally vulgar and unschooled as much as it is irrational or bigoted. 

Some of his critics have pointed out the inconsistency in Dawkins being happy with the decline of Christian worshippers but unhappy at the prospect of losing Christian buildings. But to imagine that one depends upon the other is to misunderstand this country's history. The state religion of the United Kingdom is the Church of England (the official churches of the peripheral nations are irrelevant), but the raison d'etre of that church is property, not theology, and it worships the greater glory of the English gentry, not God. In appearing to line up with the forces of conservatism, whether expressed as Islamophobia or transphobia, Dawkins is simply reaffirming his own liberal credentials as he sees them: a robust defence of empiricism, property rights and the superiority of native culture. Not only is there nothing surprising in Dawkins' latest contribution to the discourse but he has proved himself once more to be wholly consistent in his views.

Against Science

Simon Wren-Lewis thinks that the political right has a problem with facts and science. There's an immediate philosophical issue here in that Simon implies that the right's attitude to facts and science is uniform because he assumes that facts and science are synonymous. But this isn't the case. The right has a high respect for facts, albeit narrowly defined, but it has an innate suspicion of the ambition of science. Facts are objective certainties: their truth is indisputable. But while some on the right have a flexible view of what constitutes a fact - the contents of the Bible, or the "reality" of race - the core conservative tradition of pragmatism, exemplified by Edmund Burke and Michael Oakeshott, sees facts as limited by experience. In other words, facts exist in the realm of reality rather than speculation. As Oakeshott famously put it, "To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss". This doesn't mean that conservatives are positivists, or that they limit their sympathy only to certifiable truths. For example, that antinomy of "fact to mystery" clearly excludes the mystagogy of the Church of England and the monarchy. 

In contrast, science operates on probability - the likelihood that something is true - because certainty is limited.  The edge of science is a venture into the unknown and the scientific method is more than simple empiricism. Knowledge progresses through the refinement of working hypotheses, which means it is a combination of deductive and inductive reasoning. The discipline of economics, Simon's specialism, has often been criticised for its pretension to scientific rigour, particularly in its reliance on mathematical models, but this is to imagine that economics deals in facts of a mathematical nature. It doesn't. Economics is a social science, which means that its truth is often contingent, hence the prevalence of stylised facts: general principles that hold in aggregate but for which contrary evidence can always be found at the granular level. That facts and science are not synonymous is not just pedantry. It points towards an important distinction in conservative thought between the familiar and the unknown, which is another way of saying between practice and theory.

Simon describes the right's problem thus: "Why does the political right increasingly seem to be on the wrong side of facts and science, and what should scientists do about it? One answer to the first question comes from asking another. Do some on the left, by which I mean those whose views are to the left of the positions adopted by the current Labour leadership, occasionally have problems with facts and science? My own answer would be that some can, at least in the area I know best which is economics. The example that is freshest in my mind is UK inflation." That "occasionally" is doing a lot of work. His specific argument is that "the inflationary episode we have recently been through in the UK was in part generated by higher energy and food prices, but it was also a result of strong labour markets, where unemployment was low by recent historical standards and vacancies were very high. ... some on the left were much happier talking about imported inflation than labour markets being too strong. Many claimed inflation was profit led. Yet the evidence so far for the UK is pretty clear that profit shares, outside of the energy sector, have remained pretty stable." 

This ignores that the left is not necessarily viewing the "episode" as simply another random event that can be empirically assessed. Rather leftists tend to see it in historical terms as part of a longer trend (a stylised fact, if you prefer), commencing in the late-1970s, that has suppressed working class incomes and boosted returns to capital, leading to today's high levels of inequality. The short-term stability of profit shares in sectors other than energy is not incompatible with this. The tendency to accuse the left of a utopian obsession with the future means that its engagement with history tends to be occluded. For example, critical theory is deeply embedded in historical reasoning as much as social science but is commonly presented as unmoored from both. The qualifiers in Simon's statement - "some", "many" - and his use of "happier" indicates that he recognises that the left has exhibited a range of opinions, both in respect of the latest bout of inflation and the secular trends of the last half-century, but he is obliged to construct a left strawman in order to establish a commonality with the right, namely the power of ideology: "My point is not that left and right are much the same. They are obviously not, and the right has power while the left do not. Instead it is to suggest one source of reality denial is ideology." 

This sails dangerously close to the centrist conceit that everyone bar the centre is driven by ideology, which requires Simon to indulge a form of horseshoe theory in which both left and right are vulnerable to self-delusion: "The ideological source of the left’s focus on profits rather than a strong labour market is obvious. On the right, neoliberalism typically argues against state ‘interference’ with firms and markets. Both climate change and lockdowns are about the state taking measures to avoid extreme externalities. Equally a libertarian ideology would see both policies as restricting personal liberty". Again, that "obvious" is doing a lot of work. In fact, there are plenty on the left who consider an obsession with profit to be merely vulgar, in the Marxian sense, and who would prefer to focus on the clear differentiator between left and right that Simon himself identifies, namely power. The claim that neoliberalism argues against state interefence with firms and markets suggests that Simon really doesn't understand neoliberalism either in theory or practice, though I suppose that "typically" might allow him a degree of leeway. 

Neoliberalism is first and foremost a theory of state power. While inspired by Austrian economics (or classical liberalism, if you prefer), it is a pragmatic of how to introduce the market into a social democratic framework. Despite all of the "reforms" since 1979, Western European economies remain fundamentally social democratic, hence we still have state interference, large public sectors and high rates of taxation. Even the US, with its private healthcare and weak labour laws, is recognisably the social democratic polity built between the 1930s and 60s, despite the Reagan revolution. The equivalence of neoliberalism and libertarianism is also naive. While the election of Javier Milei to the Argentinian Presidency may prove a damp squib because he is clearly just a neoliberal with a daft haircut, the vote itself was decided by the specific difference of what was sold as libertarianism. Getting rid of the central bank and dollarising the economy is not neoliberal practice precisely because it curtails state power.

At this point in his argument, Simon executes a sharp turn to highlight the return of the "paranoid style" (a la Richard Hofstadter) to conservative politics, mainly in the US but also in the UK and particularly in the media: "To see how this paranoid style sits far too easily with today’s politics on the right we can look at right wing media, and in the UK with the strong crossover in recent years between those writing in that media and Conservative political leaders and their advisers". The problem with this turn is that ideology does not neatly segue into conspiracism. The one is a collection of beliefs, not necessarily consistent or coherent, while the other is a style of reasoning that posits a singular "key" that explains manifold phenomena. The purpose of Simon's swerve is to establish a line from the media's indulgence of untruth to the Conservative Party's rejection of scientific expertise ("One of our former Prime Ministers made his journalistic reputation doing just this by making things up about the EU"). 

But this isn't convincing. Telling lies, or being "economical with the verité", is not the same as having contempt for science. All politicians lie and mislead - consider the current leader of the opposition - but few of them were trained in the art at newspapers. The Johnson adminstration's disregard for scientific advice, which has been on ample show during the pandemic inquiry, was clearly the product of a more fundamental disregard for the lives of others and a blasé attitude towards public health. That can certainly be attributed to ideology, but the ideology in question is the traditional Tory one, marked by a contempt for the common herd and an aversion to further empowering the state bureaucracy at a time of crisis. Boris Johnson did not mark a departure from Tory values, any more than the pursuit of varying degrees of austerity by successive administrations from 2010 onwards did. The last 15 years have obviously been frustrating for a Keynesian, but to imagine this came about because of a recent rejection of facts and science, rather than a recapitulation of the traditional Treasury view, is - well - paranoid.

Simon's blogpost dribbles away into inconsequentiality and an appeal to liberal virtue: "The most effective way of tilting the scales back towards reality and science is to endeavour to ensure these politicians and this political viewpoint are kept well away from power in the future". Good luck with that, mate. This obviously ignores the structural dimension, and it is here that he could benefit from addressing the analyses of the left, notably Marxists like David Harvey and Robert Brenner, on the long-term causes of the current moment, from the spatio-temporal fixes of capitalist accumulation to the crisis of profitability and secular stagnation. So long as the political system is designed to block any challenge to capitalism, and so long as neo-Keynesian economics seeks to preserve capitalism through a "synthesis", we will see politicians spouting nonsense and denying facts. As Antonio Gramsci put it, "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear".

Some Monsters Are Bigger Than Others

Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi published a provocative essay in The Economist last month that drew a parallel, via the meme of the Lovecraftian shoggoth, between what we are obliged to refer to as AI for shorthand and older monsters of oppression and alien knowledge: "But what such worries [about AI] fail to acknowledge is that we’ve lived among shoggoths for centuries, tending to them as though they were our masters. We call them “the market system”, “bureaucracy” and even “electoral democracy”. The true Singularity began at least two centuries ago with the industrial revolution, when human society was transformed by vast inhuman forces. Markets and bureaucracies seem familiar, but they are actually enormous, impersonal distributed systems of information-processing that transmute the seething chaos of our collective knowledge into useful simplifications." This idea of an unknowable immensity is central to Friedrich Hayek's view of the market and the occult value of the price signal. But it also clearly stands in contradistinction to the tradition that starts with Marx in which the superstructure is rationally explicable as a product of the base and, as developed by later thinkers, its mystification is a means of control rather than an innate characteristic.

One useful service Farrell and Shalizi perform by highlighting this social science lineage is that it brings AI squarely within the realm of politics - i.e. as a matter of choice rather than simply as an external inevitability that must be regulated, as was the case with industrialisation in the nineteenth century. As the authors say, "We would be better off figuring out what will happen as LLMs compete and hybridise with their predecessors than weaving dark fantasies about how they will rise up against us." An obvious place to start is in the mating dance of the current incumbent AI developers and the state over the issue of regulation. Predictably, given that this is appearing on the pages of The Economist, the essay imagines this contest in terms of an equilibrium between the market and democracy, thus: "We eke out freedom by setting one against another, deploying bureaucracy to limit market excesses, democracy to hold bureaucrats accountable, and markets and bureaucracies to limit democracy’s monstrous tendencies. How will the newest shoggoth change the balance, and which politics might best direct it to the good?"

In an extended version published on the Crooked Timber blog, Farrell emphasises that the occult nature of these social technologies has long been recognised: "When one looks past the ordinary justifications and simplifications, these enormous systems seem irreducibly strange and inhuman, even though they are the condensate of collective human understanding. Some of their votaries have recognized this. Hayek – the great defender of unplanned markets – admitted, and even celebrated the fact that markets are vast, unruly, and incapable of justice. He argues that markets cannot care, and should not be made to care whether they crush the powerless, or devour the virtuous." But there's an obvious qualification to be made here. While the unknowability and the lack of conscience of the market has been celebrated, the same can't be said with regard to bureaucracy or democracy; quite the opposite. The demand is always that the former be accountable (i.e. virtuous) and that the latter be representative (i.e. an accurate reflection of the popular will). And look back at that quote in the previous paragraph: it is bureacracy that limits market excess not democracy, and it is democracy that poses the "monstrous" threat. Is that the way the world works or is that simply how The Economist views it?

Farrell and Shalizi's conclusion is that the consequence of LLMs "will involve the modest-to-substantial transformation, or (less likely) replacement of their older kin." Building on their essay, Daniel Davies suggests that they "are basically telling us that the current generation of AI should be seen first and foremost as a new technique for the amplification of management capacity. And this means that it’s likely to drive significant organisational change, of one kind or another. The robots are perhaps neither our overlords nor our colleagues; perhaps they’re a bunch of management consultants that we’ve hired." This emphasis on information management is reasonable given the nature of LLMs, but it also implies that the application of this new technology is likely to bias towards those older social technologies where clarity is required, i.e. bureaucracy and democracy. Its application in the realm of the market, where the occult is lauded, seems much less plausible. Farrell and Shalizi's suggestion in The Economist article that LLMs might deliver on the promise of central planning is clearly intended to invite the derision of the paper's readers.

Davies' metaphor of the management consultant might suggest possibilities in the private sector, but we need to remember that the highest profile use of such resources as a transformative agent has long been in the public sector, under the rubric of "reform". And much of what that consultancy boils down to is the need to mimic the "best practice" of the commerical world as a preparatory stage towards outsourcing, not least the introduction of pricing and internal markets. The metaphor should also alert us that LLMs will likely promote a particular brand of management, just as the likes of McKinsey and Boston Consulting do, if only because the corpus of data from which it derives its suggestions will be dominated by that particular tradition. And this brings us to another key point, that of language. A paradox of LLM-based AIs in popular commentary is that language itself appears to be incidental, rather than foundational, which reflects the anglocentric nature of the technology industry and indeed the preponderance of English text online. 

But LLMs do not operate at the level of a Chomskyan universal grammar, so the idea that this can lead to an artifical general intelligence (AGI), with the emphasis on "general", is obviously flawed. At best you can talk about a general English intelligence, to which the Spanish and Mandarin equivalents will be puny in comparison. If AI presents an existential threat it is probably to the idea of the monolingual non-English speaker, not to humanity at large, but that threat has existed for some time now and has been significantly advanced by the spread of the Internet. The dominance of English not only in business and culture but in information processing itself long ago meant that the social technologies of the market, bureaucracy and democracy were stamped as indelibly anglocentric. This isn't even a new thought. The recognition that systems of knowledge (epistemes, in Michel Foucault's phrase) govern what we can know and express has been around since the 1950s and the emergence of structuralism, while the recognition of the inherent bias of such systems (the conditions of the possibility of knowledge) is the foundation of post-structuralism.

Where Farrell and Shalizi's lineage is perhaps lacking is in its recognition of the variety of those older social technologies and how much that variety has reduced over time due to the growing dominance of English and information management. If we think about an LLM more realistically as a language corpus rather than as an "intelligence" then the transformation they imagine AI leading to has been underway for decades. The twin recognition of historic variety and the tendency towards homogenisation can be seen in the way that national bureaucracies, reflecting different cultural norms, have gradually converged in their practices. But crucially the agent for that convergence has been the market, and specifically an Anglo-Saxon conception of it, most obviously in the form of New Public Management and other attempts to instill "commercial rigour". Likewise the practice of democracy has changed over the last 50 years, notably in the electorate's understanding of whose interests individuals are voting in. One relationship Farrell and Shalizi didn't highlight in The Economist is the way that the market has promoted the notion of the self-interested voter as a consumer of "retail policies", replacing the older idea of the altruistic voter considering what is best for her nation, locality or class. 

In other words, and counter to Farrell and Shalizi's story, there hasn't been an equilibrium between the market, bureaucracy and democracy since the 1970s. The first has succesfully dominated and altered the latter two. Do LLMs offer the possibility of a counter-movement to that encroachment by the market? Perhaps a better way of putting that is to ask what social values are inherent to a predominantly English language corpus built on the Internet since the early-90s? Do we think that the distilled essence of the blogosphere and social media inclines towards justice? This week Mark Zuckerberg has claimed that his new Threads social media platform will promote "kindness" rather than the "hostility" of Twitter. Given that the platform is largely just a rebadging of Instagram to make it look like a microblog, you have to understand "kindness" in terms of the relentless visual consumption and curated feed of the photo-centric platform, i.e. a perfect expression of an advert-led market, and "hostility" as a synonym for politics, i.e. an expression of messy plurality and dissent. It would appear that the monstrous market continues to dominate and has already absorbed the transformative potential of LLMs. This is not an equal fight.

A Return to Class

The New Statesman has started to show a greater interest in leftwing thought since 2019, which might appear paradoxical given its clear support for Keir Starmer's leadership of the Labour Party. This has also coincided with a turnover in contributors that has seen more varied voices - such as Rory Scothorne and Richard Seymour - added to the roster, though it has also seen the conventional if occasionally astute Stephen Bush recently replaced as Political Editor by the even more conventional and invariably obtuse Andrew Marr. Its foreign affairs coverage, which is what the establishment ultimately cares most about, remains decidely Atlanticist, whether in the form of Jeremy Cliffe's eurocentrism or Paul Mason's nostalgic social democracy. So what is going on? Are these tentative steps towards the left a recognition that the paper alienated many of its readers by its often hysterical opposition to Jeremy Corbyn? Or is this an attempt to confine the left to arid discourse, well away from the levers of power, as was the case in the 1990s? 

These respectively material and cynical explanations are plausible, but I think there's a case to be made for another: that this is part of a wider war of position that complements Starmer's war of manoeuvre. That doesn't mean promoting leftwing thought but absorbing it into a hegemonic project. A current example of this is provided in an interview with the communist academic, Jodi Dean, centred on her 2019 book, Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging. It's significant that the interviewer, Freddie Hayward, references the first part of that title but not the second. Dean's position is that organic political identity - the recognition of one's own oppression as a woman or an ethnic minority - can distract from a political belonging that has to be painstakingly constructed. But Hayward reinterprets this to mean that identity politics is a dead-end that undermines class politics, rather than a stage in a process of growing political consciousness (in Marx's famous formulation, towards a class for itself). The central premise of the article is that the left (never precisely defined) is divided by "arguments about race and gender" (again, assumed rather than explained or exemplified). 

In fact, Dean's argument is a more subtle one: that "communicative capitalism" - i.e. modernity and the way that self-actualisation has been commodified through new media - leads to the over-valuation of the personal and emotional over the collective and the rational. At heart, hers is an intersectional argument, not unlike Bernie Sanders' point in 2016 that being a woman was not enough - that class solidarity matters too. But you'd easily come away from the article with the suspicion that Dean didn't think much of Black Lives Matter or the Gender Recognition Act. You also have to put Dean's arguments into the context of a longer tradition dating from the 1980s that deplored the postmodern (or "post-Marxist", in the contemporary terminology) turn away from class analysis. This turn was seen less as the product of new technology or academic fashion than as the result of neoliberal hegemony. A notable example was Ellen Meiksins Wood's 1986 work, The Retreat from Class, which took issue with the intellectual tendency, exemplified by Marxism Today in the UK, to substitute a progressive universalism for class politics, something that appeared particularly questionable against the backdrop of the miners' strike.

The change between Meiksins Wood and Dean concerns the way that the neoliberal dream of a progressive universalism advanced by free markets and personal choice has been undermined, not only by imperial projects such as Iraq and Afghanistan but by the steady growth of inequality, the looming threat of climate change and the recrudescence of national chauvinism and xenophobia. In the conclusion of her book, Meiksins Wood quotes Michael Ignatieff (whom she describes as "the darling of the British literary press, their favourite repentant socialist and resident progressive") from a New Statesman article of December 1984, entitled Strangers and Comrades: "What the Left needs is a language of national unity expressed as commitment to fellowship among strangers. We need a language of trust built upon a practice of social comradeship". As subsequent history has shown, not least Ignatieff's political career, the use of "comrade" was about diluting class solidarity into a civic nationalism (the UK Labour Party's current appeals to patriotism show that this project continues). In contrast, Dean's use of the term is about surfacing class interests against the distractions of national identity as much as fragmented social identity.

Hayward doesn't mention Ellen Meiksins Wood but he does mention Mark Fisher whose 2013 essay, Exiting the Vampire Castle, he summarises as rejecting "identitarianism", but without explaining that Fisher's beef was more precisely with "bourgeois modes of subjectivity" and the "moralism" that this gives rise to (in other words, a well-established critique of liberalism) rather than identity politics tout court. Of course, many of Fisher's contemporaries made the same mistake and promptly formed a firing squad. Just as Meiksins Wood's analysis should not be divorced from its context in the repression of the organised working class in the mid-80s, so Fisher's lament reflected his frustrations with the anticapitalist protests that culminated in the Occupy movement, which he castigated for its unwillingness to organise and embrace power: "Because the anti-capitalist movements that have arisen since the 90s have ultimately done nothing, they have caused capital no concern at all — it has been so easy to route around them. Part of the reason for that is the fact that they have taken place out on the street, ignoring the politics of the workplace and of the everyday."

This was too pessimistic an analysis by Fisher. The contemporary context for Dean's book, published before Labour's 2019 defeat and the end of Bernie Sanders' second presidential nomination campaign, was of a resurgent left that was busy organising (and compromising) within the established centre-left parties and union movements of both the UK and US. In other words, there has been a conscious move by the left towards power, even allowing for the periodic recourse to emblematic street protest, such as Black Lives Matter marches and the toppling of statues, and this move has been marked by both a theoretical and a practical revival of class politics: from a push to get more working class (and female and minority) representatives in legislatures to fights for union recognition and a new workplace militancy. The context of Hayward's article, in contrast, is the steady black-balling of the left on both sides of the Atlantic, with Labour members expelled on the flimsiest of pretexts, or disciplined into silence, and the Democrat left marginalised by the party machine.

Amusingly, Hayward's article has two tags: communism and Dominic Cummings. The latter appears in the introduction purely in order to lever in a (slighting) reference to Jacques Lacan that in turn serves to allow Hayward to characterise the left as subject to a Lacanian "drive" - i.e. the repetitive circling around an object of desire that cannot give full satisfaction. This is pretty shallow pyschology that simply reframes the traditional dismissal of the left as unrealistic and obsessive. It also seeks to shift responsibility for what Hayward calls the left's "recent impotence" onto its own shortcomings and away from the resistance and sabotage of the political centre. For example, "The Labour Party seems to enjoy endlessly arguing about its failures more than ruthlessly focusing on success. Conflicts over the legacy of Jeremy Corbyn and the disaster of the 2019 general election are filled with such passion you can’t help but sense a whiff of jouissance." 

This might appear a general criticism of the party except that the constant harping on about failure (and the studied amnesia over relative success, such as 2017) has been a characteristic of the party right more than the left in recent years. For them, the answer to every "disaster", real or imagined, is a further move to the right, even to the point of outflanking the Tories. In reality, the left recognised that there would be no Corbyn legacy two years ago when Starmer began to renege on his promise to build on it. Inasmuch as the left engaged in bitter recrimination after the 2019 defeat, it centred on the questions of whether more could have been done to cement its advance organisationally and whether a better Brexit policy was ever possible. Both were examples of a pragmatic perspective on power rather than the utopian delusion or self-indulgence with which the left is routinely charged by its critics.

In part Hayward is borrowing Dean's ideas on communicative capitalism to further damn social media as an antisocial development that breeds solipsism. So far, so typical of his profession. But his emphasis on the recovery of class politics, while simultaneously approving of nominally left parties that "have distanced themselves from the socialism of the past", presents something of a conundrum. This is clearly more than an attempt to hold the demands of identity politics at bay. It has a positive as much as a negative element to it. So what is Hayward arguing for? The answer appears to be a return to Labour's traditional economism, though in the more explicitly pro-business guise introduced by New Labour, thus: "Until the left refocuses on the economy as opposed to culture, Dean says, the inequalities that identity politics highlights are going to persist." That's not actually what Dean says. As a Marxist, she is very clear that the issue is ultimately the ownership of the means of production, not the fantastic object that we call the economy. This explains why an article on class finds no space for the role of trade unions, let alone more radical ideas such as workers' control. 

The Right to Have Rights

Citizenship is often referred to, in the words of Hannah Arendt, as the right to have rights, a phrase central to chapter 9 of The Origins of Totalitarianism ("The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man"). She was highlighting a paradox: that the universal declaration of human rights was meaningless outside of the context of the nation state, whose rights were limited to the national citizenry and therefore not universal. Though this is actually a conservative argument that originates in Edmund Burke's condemnation of the universal ambitions of the French Revolution, it struck a chord in 1951 in a Europe still awash with displaced persons and a world struggling to come to terms with the establishment of the state of Israel: a development that both crystallised the national rights of Jews and immediately deprived many Palestinians of their own rights. It was also a reminder of the failings of the interwar period, with the denial of rights to national minorities and the institutionalisation of refugees through Nansen passports, as well as a pointer to the way that the developing Cold War would centre polemically on the rights of dissent and democratic representation (though it's worth noting here how little contemporary tragedies such as the partition of India seemed to inform the debate around rights and citizenship).

The paradox that Arendt noted remains at the heart of today's discourse on rights, for example in the British tension between the European Convention on Human Rights and the nebulous ideal of a "bill of rights" that would be a particular expression of the national genius (itself an ambiguous concept in a multi-national state whose original Bill of Rights in 1689 was distinctly sectarian). Arendt's resolution of the paradox, insofar as she advanced one, was that no one should be denied the right to be a member of some political community - that they shouldn't be made stateless - as without this foundational right there could be no other rights. This made a sort of sense during the Cold War, when the denial of political rights often led to exile and asylum claims were treated sympathetically, at least in the context of movement East to West if not South to North, but in the present the right to have rights is increasingly a qualified right applied within the borders of a national polity. This highlights that the issue of rights is about something more fundamental and persistent than the statelessness that emerged with the fragmentaion of the old European empires after 1918.

The core of the rights entailed by membership of the national community - or, to put it another way, the supreme rights of citizenship - are political rights. But this presents a problem that has been present since the formalisation of the liberal ideal of citizenship in the 17th and 18th centuries, namely that these rights were never regarded as universal (and nor was democracy associated with universal suffrage until well into the twentieth century). Not only was the 1689 Bill of Rights explicitly anti-Catholic, but the US Constitution of 1776 famously excluded native Americans and slaves from the national community while the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen denied full political rights to women and also failed to abolish slavery (though its claims to universality were still enough to inspire the revolt in Haiti). Olympe de Gouge, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Citizen, argued that if "Women have the right to mount the scaffold, they must also have the right to mount the speaker's rostrum". She never made it to the National Assembly but she did meet the guillotine in 1793. 

This discrimination in political rights is seen today not only in the tangible form of citizenship apartheid, as practised in Israel (both de jure in the 2018 Basic Law and de facto in the occupied territories), or an insistence that particular minorities prove their loyalty as citizens, as many across the political spectrum in France are now demanding. It also takes the form of the disciplining of citizens through restrictions on their national rights up to and including expulsion, as in the UK's 2014 Immigration Act and the current Nationality and Borders bill. Though such extreme measures may be rare in practice, the establishment of the principle of the "sovereign right of expulsion" - that the state can administratively deprive you of your rights such that the outcome is no different to being driven out of the country at the point of a gun - means that the lesser qualification of political rights, such as the denial of the vote to prisoners or the introduction of mandatory IDs at the ballot box, can be framed as modest hygiene measures rather than part of a more general programme that seeks to restrict democracy.

Jacques Rancière's 2004 critique of Arendt centres on what he sees as her questionable separation of the realms of the political citizen and the stateless: the presumption that those denied the rights of citizenship are thereby excluded from engaging politically, such that denationalisation equates to depoliticisation. This obviously rests on a narrow definition of the political, which may have been tenable in the 1950s but seemed too restrictive by the 1970s and the flowering of a range of activism (anti-racism, feminism, gay rights) that sought to intervene in society directly rather than via the vector of formal politics. Arendt's position has been rescued to a degree by those who emphasise that her understanding of statelessness centred not simply on the loss of political presence but on "world-loss", the loss of a sense of belonging in a human community, and that it is this that has been resisted by the growth of solidarity.  Another way of looking at it is that Arendt's own experience of statelessness (from 1937 to 1950) as a haute bourgeois German Jewish intellectual led her to see it in terms of individual exclusion and flight, to the detriment of a recognition that most exclusions affect entire communities and many do not even result in physical displacement.

While nation states continue to offer meagre support to refugees and asylum-seekers, and while social solidarity remains fitful - oscillating between sentimentality and disinterest, the activism of supporters is significantly better than it was in the postwar years precisely because it has moved on from charity and a pious humanitarianism to political engagement and thus the assumption of rights. Parallel to this, there has been an increasing recognition that groups within society, otherwise secure in their citizenship, face restriction and even outright curtailment of their rights in a structural manner that cannot be divorced from the operation of the state. For example, that "The key insight behind Black Lives Matters activism is, after all, that black Americans cannot depend on their government to guarantee them the standard legal protections routinely enjoyed by white citizens." Paradoxically, as the global population has become more mobile due to the opportunities of globalisation and the imperative of advancing climate change, the right to have rights has increasingly been discussed in terms of the qualification of citizenship rather than its supersession. 

It is not remotely likely that the UK government will deprive six million people of their citizenship, but it is restricting the rights of that number. The idea that such fundamental rights could be qualified or taken away entirely gives rise to a pervasive sense of insecurity. This may express itself negatively in xenophobia and a lack of sympathy for refugees, but the causes are more to do with a fraying sense of social identity and the precariousness of employment and public services. A good example of this, and the anxieties it gives rise to, is the NHS. Being "free at the point of use" traditionally meant that it did not concern itself with the entitlement of those who sought its help. The introduction of an entitlement test, and the associated charging (more performative than effective), was partly driven by the creeping markestisation of the health service, but it also reflected the turn towards the idea that the NHS was the restricted right of the national community rather than a service operating on the principle of common humanity - i.e. that you had to be a legitimate citizen, not just a person in need of medical assistance. 

For a long time after 1945, rights were seen as a defence against the encroachment of the market into social relations. Not only could rights not be bought or bartered, but the realm of rights was conceived as being distinct and inviolable. Arendt's concern was that this realm ultimately depended on the nation state rather than any common humanity or the UN's hopeful declaration. The stateless were doubly disadvantaged - lacking rights and the right to have rights - but they could achieve rights once they crossed the border into citizenship. But this conception of a limited but secure realm of rights has given way under neoliberalism to an interpretation of rights as conditional privileges within the nation state. Universal human rights have not disappeared, but they are increasingly marginalised as someone else's concern ("We should look after our own first"), while their invocation has been reduced to a justification for military intervention by the West or a means by which the West ritually criticises other nation states for their "abuses". 

The idea of conditional privilege is a return to classical liberal thinking in which universality is no more than a rhetorical flourish that obscures a deliberate discrimination between the worthy and the unworthy, even when the latter are nominally included in the national community, such as women then and dual passport-holders now. This means that we have eroded the right to have rights. We may have and be able to exercise rights, but we no longer possess an absolute right to do so. That is because citizenship is now a privilege rather than a right, and a privilege that can increasingly be bought by the rich, and not just in the UK but in many countries around the world. Ironically, what is becoming universal is not the rights of man (or woman), but the privileges of wealth. The old ideal of a world state is slowly becoming a reality, but it will be a supranational state in which citizenship is strictly limited on an invitation-only basis. As Bong Joon Ho, the Korean director of the film Parasite puts it, "Essentially we all live in the same country called capitalism".